


as close as hands and feet

by betony



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-19
Updated: 2013-02-19
Packaged: 2017-11-29 19:57:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/690845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betony/pseuds/betony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Roy and his sisters, through the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as close as hands and feet

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Vietnamese proverb: "Brothers and sisters are as close as hands and feet." Constructive criticism and/or discussion welcome. Some parts of section iv. are paraphrased from Chapter 63 of the manga.

_i. Celeste_

The bell hung over the door jangles in warning, and Celeste guiltily sits up from where she’s been dozing behind the bar. Word has spread that Chris was out of town, business had been slow, and the girls have all gone home for the night, so Celeste hadn’t imagined that a nap before she starts to clean the place up would do that much harm. Technically, though, she is still the one in charge, although Chris emphasized quite clearly when she left that Celeste was to do nothing more than tell patrons that the bar was closed for the night. 

But it’s only Chris at the door, back from her mysterious trip and flanked by a—by a little dark-haired boy who doesn’t look to be much older than Vanessa. Well, Celeste thinks with the instinct of Madame Christmas’s infamous protégées, _there’s_ a story. 

Still, Celeste knows, better than anyone, that there’s no sense in trying to get answers out of Chris before she’s ready to give them, so instead: “Back so soon, Madame Christmas?” she drawls, picking up one of the dirty glasses littering the bar and starting to clean it. “We hardly had time to miss you.” 

Chris grins. “Good to see the bar didn’t come down round your ears while I was gone, Celeste. The girls behave for you?” 

“More or less.” Truth be told, while “the girls” who work for Chris are all at least five to ten years older than Celeste is, she is the one who boards with Chris. There’s no questioning who’s in charge in Chris’s absence, and thankfully, they understand it as well as she does. Celeste bites her lip and decides to take the chance Chris is in a forthcoming mood. “Who’s the kid?” 

“My brother’s son,” Chris says shortly, and Celeste sucks in a breath. She’d been the only one free to take a message when the MPs came by with the news of the accident, and she’d seen Chris’ face when she heard the news. “He’ll be staying with us from now on. Say hello to Celeste, Roy.” 

“Hello, Celeste,” mumbles the pipsqueak, and then goes back to hiding behind Chris. 

“Hello, yourself,” Celeste says dryly, and then, to Chris: “You can’t be serious.” 

“I beg your pardon?” 

“Chris, you run a bar. What, are you going to dress him up and have him dole out drinks?” 

Chris’s lips twitch in a parody of a smile. “There’s an idea. Like it or not, Celeste, he’s staying. He’s got nowhere else to go.” 

“His mother’s folks—“ 

“Don’t live in this country. End of discussion, Celeste.” Chris’s very tone is a warning. 

Wisely, Celeste drops the subject. Still, she eyes the boy—Roy—with considerable unease. She doesn’t know the first thing about kids. 

As it turns out, she doesn’t have to. Roy, it turns out, is utterly unlike any other child there ever is. Oh, he takes to the bar easily enough; before she knows it, he’s running around with Vanessa like the two of them were born together, and when Chris brings home _another_ child, an infant girl this time, he coos and plays with the baby, mystified. The older two get into everything whenever she doesn’t keep an eye on them, and Baby Madeleine can’t let fifteen minutes go by without needing a diaper changed, or a feeding, or just to be held. Celeste doesn’t have time for anything, not even flirting with the delivery boys. 

By the time Chris comes home with a ragged little street urchin a year or two older than Roy, Celeste is at the end of her patience. 

“No,” says Celeste wearily, “this is not an orphanage. Chris, _no._ ” 

Chris just laughs and tells Eleanor to pick out a room. 

It’s Roy who started it all, Celeste knows, Roy who made Chris think this raising orphans thing was good business, Roy who somehow charmed Celeste into thinking of herself as their collective big sister. Still, looking at him whooping as he plays tag with Vanessa and Eleanor—so different from the shy boy Chris brought home—Celeste thinks it might be for the best nevertheless. 

* * *

_ii. Vanessa_

“Are you sure you have everything?” Vanessa asks one more time, but then again, it never hurts to be sure, not when you’re going out to the Eastern boondocks. Here at home in Central, the general store is just a few minutes’ stroll down the street, and the main shopping district a few blocks further; out there, Vanessa can only envision acres and acres of farmland punctuated by the occasional sheep. 

“I think so,” Roy replies, and Vanessa doesn’t miss the flicker of uncertainty in his expression. For the past five weeks, ever since Chris informed him that after a search that had taken three years, she’d finally found an alchemist willing to teach and house him, Roy’s been strutting around the bar like someone signed him up for lessons with the bloody Sage from the East, but now that the day of his departure is almost upon him, he’s apparently decided to have a Roy-sized case of last-minute jitters. 

_Master Hawkeye will hate me,_ is the foremost miserable thought crossing Roy’s mind; Vanessa knows this, because she knows the way her idiot brother’s idiot brain works. _He’ll think I’m hopeless and kick me out in a day. Then I’ll come back home and spend my life making sure my incredibly beautiful and vastly superior sisters never have to worry about me or want for anything ever again._

(Well, fine, maybe not that last one. But she damn well thinks he ought to be thinking it.) 

“And get the Madame to stop smoking her cigarettes,” adds Roy, and Vanessa smiles. They’re all encouraged to downplay their actual relationship to Chris to protect each other and her (and certainly none of them would ever dream of calling her something as overblown as “Mom”), but to Roy, even more than the rest of them, Chris’s title has become a sign of greater affection than even her given name could be. “They’re not good for her.” 

Vanessa slouches down on the floor and beams at Roy, because really, everyone knows it’s easier to smile than cry, and says something sweet, like, “Obviously I will. Idiot.” 

“Thanks,” says Roy, and gives her a one-armed hug. 

Vanessa is determined to miss Roy more than anyone else when he leaves, because obviously she is his favorite and besides it’s absolutely terrible that she has to take over his share of chores as well as her own while he’s gone, but as it turns out, it’s awfully hard to sulk for more than three days, particularly with Celeste tsk-tsking every time she catches sight of Vanessa’s woebegone expression. Not that the others are much better; whenever she tries to convince them of her misery, Chris shakes her head and snickers, Eleanor looks damnably superior, and Baby Madeline loudly demands if Vanessa’s taken sick. So that means that less than a week in, Vanessa’s forced by powers beyond her control to behave as though all is well, and by the time she remembers her decision to protest against Roy’s departure, Roy is home for his first week of holidays. 

He looks the same. 

This is the first thing Vanessa notices and the most disappointing. Somehow she’d expected Roy would go away to study and come back better. Cooler, maybe, and more mature. But he’s the same old Roy, for the most part; he still rambles on and on about alchemy, worries about everyone and everything that isn’t his problem, and can’t tend bar without mixing up orders because he’s too busy daydreaming about the experiments he’d like to conduct. 

But now he helps cook, and has long involved conversations with Celeste about how she goes about keeping the books for the bar, and practically every other sentence out of his mouth that isn’t about alchemy is about his master’s daughter. 

Not that Vanessa has anything against Riza Hawkeye—in fact, the girl seems to be doing an excellent job of cutting Roy down to size whenever he needs it, which is _almost always_ —but it might be nice for Roy to mention something else, maybe even keep quiet and listen to Vanessa’s news, like her new haircut and the fact that Laurie asked her over twice in as many weeks, and best of all, that stray comment about the Aeroguan Defense she’d managed to charm out of a young cadet that even Chris thought was an inspired performance. 

But there’s not much she can do about Roy being Roy, and honestly she’s in such a good mood that she thinks she just might be able to let it slide for a bit longer. Even when Roy intercepts her at the staircase and begs, “Quiz me,” as though everything he’s learned is going to tumble out of his head just like that, _really,_ Vanessa only smiles benevolently and agrees. 

“My turn,” Vanessa says, as soon as they’ve flipped through all Roy’s notes and done the hard lessons twice, and then she hands him her stack of notecards, neatly labeled with all Amestris’s neighboring countries, their strengths, weaknesses, and the counterintelligence measures commonly used in each. Predictably Roy makes a face, because he’s _obsessed_ with his alchemy, just plain stupid like that, and no matter how much Vanessa warns him not to, he insists that he doesn’t need to know the politics that Madame Christmas drums into her girls. 

After all, no matter how much Roy breaks the world around them down to his beloved atoms, it’ll be the human heart that he’ll need to understand to survive. That’s exactly what worries Vanessa most; if he can’t even work out why politics _matter_ , how is he ever going to manage anything else? 

That’ll have to be what she’s here for, then. Clearly her work will never be done. 

* * *

_iii. Eleanor_

Two and a half days since Roy came back home from the war, and Eleanor hasn’t laid eyes on him since. 

At last she decides enough is enough. Celeste is at home, on bed rest with her twins. Vanessa cried when she saw the state Roy was in when he staggered dead-eyed through the door and still gets teary every time he comes up in conversation. Baby Madeline is too young to understand what’s going on, and Chris has enough to worry about with the influx of new information returning soldiers bring to the bar. That leaves Eleanor to knock some sense into Roy’s thick head long enough to get some food down his throat. 

Sausages and rolls are all she can scrounge up in the kitchen at this late hour; Roy will simply have to make do. Eleanor adds some of the cookies Madeline brought home from the bakery that afternoon but, after some thought, leaves the brandy behind. 

The bar is almost empty by now. There’s only one customer left, a lieutenant colonel by the look of his epaulettes, and Vanessa is already perched besides him at the bar, twirling a lock of hair around a finger and laughing. Chris is in her office, cross-referencing accounts, and Madeline is at the sink washing up dirty glasses. It’s easy enough, therefore, to slip up the back staircase to Roy’s room, tray in hand, with a minimum of fuss. 

She doesn’t have a hand free to knock on the door, which is just as well, since she isn’t in the mood to knock anyway. Instead she kicks at the bottom of the door with a booted toe. “Roy!” she whispers. “Roy, open up!” 

No response. Eleanor bites back an oath and kicks again, harder. _“Roy!”_

Roy-Boy knows her well enough to recognize she won’t stop until she gets what she wants. All those months in Ishval can’t have changed that. At last he gives in and opens the door, halfway through her third round of kicking. Good choice, she thinks fiercely. If he hadn’t, she would have let the food drop to the floor and pulled out her lock-picking kit, boundaries be damned. 

“What is it?” Roy snarls, and then he looks down at the tray. His gloves are still on. “What’s that?” he asks, maybe without enthusiasm but with the closest thing to actual curiosity she’s heard from yet. Eleanor breathes a little easier. 

She’s not entirely sure how to answer him, not sure if this even qualifies as breakfast or dinner or lunch anymore. Instead she settles for a crisp, “Food.” As she elbows her way past him into the bedroom, she adds, “Can I come in?” 

“Please,” Roy drawls, and the ghost of his old grin flickers across his gaunt face, “make yourself at home.” 

“Thanks,” Eleanor shoots back, “I will.” 

She doesn’t move until Roy’s finished all his meal. 

“There,” she says. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” 

Roy snorts. “Or maybe you’re just so damn persuasive.” 

When she takes the tray back down, Baby Madeline’s nowhere in sight and Vanessa is all done, her officer already pushed out the door. She’s sitting at the bar, head in her hands. 

“All right?” Eleanor asks, setting the dishes down. She hopes the answer is yes; the last thing they need is both Roy and Vanessa to reach the depths of despair at the same time. 

There’s a strange light in Vanessa’s eyes. “He was talking about how _clever_ his last campaign was, sending his soldiers out to scout the terrain ahead of him first so he’d stay clear of the mines, and I kept on remembering Roy talking about how they sent the alchemists into Ishval first, and it was exactly the same thing, and it made me sick, Eleanor, to think that man was just going to get up tomorrow and go back to work and do that to someone else’s brother before he comes back here for another drink that I’ll have to serve to him, and I swear, if I don’t drag every last secret out of him so that he gets exactly what he deserves, you can—you can dye my hair _purple_ and call me King Bradley!” 

Despite everything, Eleanor has to fight back a grin; it would only offend Vanessa. Such passion, even by Vanessa’s usual standards, and it’s not just because of Roy, even if he was the cause of it. Vanessa wants to drag every last secret out of the military because that’s the only way she sees any future at all for Amestris. Certainly Eleanor’s never felt like that about working at the bar, not about anything, really, except when it comes to arguing and getting her way: as she just has with Roy, as a matter of fact. 

For the first time, she feels uneasy about her future—and it’s all Roy-Boy’s fault, damn him. 

* * *

_iv. Madeline_

Truth be told, Madeline actually doesn’t mind being sent out to pass along their newest information to Roy, but that certainly doesn’t stop her from grumbling when Chris first brings up the subject. 

“That wasn’t a request, Maddie,” Chris rasps at last. “Professional courtesy means we get our clients what they want as soon as possible.” 

“Oh, all right,” says Madeline, rolling her eyes exaggeratedly, and she climbs up the stairs to go get ready. 

Roy always gives her more money than the other girls, in part because these days, between Eleanor’s studies and Vanessa’s growing specialization in foreign affairs, Madeline’s got better information for Roy than anyone else. It’s also because Roy’s a soft touch who loves his sisters—a fact Madeline is perfectly willing to exploit if it means she has enough money to buy that nice mink coat she’s had her eye on for weeks. Of course, that means she has to put up with Roy’s terrible sense of humor; he still, after all this time, thinks it’s funny to call her “baby,” as though an age difference of seven years ever meant anything to anyone in the grand scheme of things. But it’s usually easy enough to shut him up, though: simply bring up the subject of Elizabeth, and watch Roy produce his best impression of a beached fish. 

Eight oh-five, she thinks, squinting down the street from the bar to see if she can make out the outline of the car yet. You’re late, Roy-Boy. 

She knows what Chris is going to say one of these days, that it’s almost time she started thinking seriously about what she’s going to do with her life, and maybe even who she’s going to do it with. After all, Celeste has three children and a house to run; Vanessa has her Laurie and a job waiting for her at the bar; Eleanor is studying for her last set of legal exams before opening up her practice; and everyone knows Roy-Boy’s been married to his Lieutenant in everything but name practically since they were infants. 

Madeline isn’t sure she wants all of that just now. She wants to help out around the bar, naturally, and make sure Amestris is safe, of course; but mostly she wants to be twenty-two, unattached, and free to dance and dance and dance all night. 

There, finally, is Roy’s car, and he’s talking to—ooh, is that the Fullmetal Alchemist? And some loudmouth blond kid with him. Anyway, Roy pulls up beside her at last, and darts out, an oh-too-cheery welcome on his lips. 

Madeline bites back her amusement and asks if he wasn’t dumping her for someone else (though she guesses the Fullmetal Alchemist was pretty important, all things considered) and listens to his assurances that no one could ever match her. That’s right, Roy-Boy; better remember that when it came time to pay her. 

In the car, Roy’s first question is: “How’s the bar, Madeline?” 

An easy one to start off with. “Not bad,” she replies. “Business is booming. We miss you, though. Come by sometime.” 

Roy lets out a tired laugh. “We’ll see. Has the Madame started complaining yet?” 

“Not yet, but you know it’ll be soon. And if you make me listen to Vanessa’s whining about how we see you even less now that you’ve moved to Central for another night in a row, I’ll never forgive you, Roy!” 

“Don’t worry, Baby—“ Roy chuckles again, more sincerely, at her scowl reflected in the rearview mirror “—I’ll come by and see them both, I promise. Now, what do you have for me?” 

Madeline pulls out her notebook and goes down the list. It’s a fairly long one, this week, but it’s all too clear that none of this is what he wants to hear. He pays the usual, though, adding a little extra because Roy knows perfectly well about that mink coat waiting for her in the display window of Lindstrom and Sons; he even drops her off near the store so she can buy it as soon as possible. 

For a second, she feels guilty. It’s not easy to forget the sag in Roy’s shoulders, the harsh reality of Lieutenant Hawkeye’s reassignment, the whispers on the streets that are getting louder and louder by the day. But that, she thinks, is all the more reason why she should go out tonight. Roy knows that’s exactly what she means to do; he’s got a hell of a poker face, yes, but Madeline recognizes that wistful gleam in his eye. 

What Roy-Boy wants to know more than anything is that even though he’s miserable at the moment, someone else that he loves isn’t. So Madeline will do him the courtesy of having the time of her life tonight in her new coat. Tomorrow morning, she’ll allow herself a nice long sleep, and tomorrow evening, she’ll look up all the marks she picked out at the dance club and get Roy-Boy the information he needs to take the government down and head out for a night on the town himself. 

What more can a sister do?


End file.
